Is my hard drive dead?

I have a 1.5TB external hard drive and had it connected to my MacBook pro. I accidentally unplugged the hard drive before disengaging it from the Mac, and now it says it can't read the drive when I plug it back in. On my PC, nothing shows up.

What's happened? I didn't have anything playing from the hard drive when this occurred, and it's still humming along suggesting it's working. Can someone please help?

First off, let's get this over to the right forum (Other Hardware and Peripherals).

The first thing I'd do would be to attach the drive to your Mac and open Disk Utility. Run Verify/Repair Disk and Verify/Repair Permissions and see what happens. Your hard drive is likely fine (physically), but there's probably some filesystem corruption, which should be able to be repaired.

Does the drive show up when you attach it to your Mac and open Disk Utility?

(Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility)

I'm a fan of a software called Disk Warrior. I've used it a few times when I have any sort of hardware trouble.

I had a 240GB Western Digital external about 4 years ago that seemed to be 100% destroyed. No matter how many times I tried to repair in Disk Utility, it was to no avail. After a lot of frustration I tried out Disk Warrior, and it saved my drive. Since then, I've always resorted to Disk Warrior for trouble shooting. I even burned it on a boot disk just incase I do something stupid. (Which is likely to happen from time to time)